The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (20 page)

“I only wanted to … to look in on you,” he said to Julie without so much as glancing at her. “To see that you were well. I worry on your account.…”

His voice trailed off.

“Ah, I know who you are!” said the man suddenly, in a faultless British accent. “You are Lawrence’s friend, are you not? Your name is Samir.”

“We have met?” Samir said. “I do not remember.”

His eyes moved tentatively over the figure that approached him now, and suddenly he was staring fixedly at the outstretched hand, at the ruby ring, and the ring with the cartouche of Ramses the Great, and it seemed the room had become quite unreal; that the voices speaking to him were making no sense, and that there was no necessity to answer.

The ring he had seen through the mummy’s wrappings! There
was no mistake. He could not make such a mistake. And what was Julie saying that could possibly matter now? Words so politely spoken, but all lies, and this being was staring back at him, knowing full well that he recognized the ring, knowing full well that words just didn’t matter.

“I hope Henry didn’t run to you with that nonsense of his.…” Yes, that was the meaning.

But it was not nonsense at all. And slowly he shifted his gaze and forced himself to see for himself that she was safe and sound and sane. Then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he looked not at the ring but at the King’s face, at the steady blue eyes which understood everything.

When he spoke to her again, it was a meaningless murmur:

“Your father would not have wanted for you to be unprotected. Your father would have wanted me to come.…”

“Ah, but Samir, friend of Lawrence,” the other said, “there is no danger now to Julie Stratford.” And dropping suddenly into the ancient Egyptian with an accent Samir had never heard: “This woman is loved by me and shall be protected from all harm.”

Stunning, that sound. He backed away. Julie was talking again. And again he wasn’t listening. He had gone to the mantel shelf and held on to it now as if he might fall.

“Surely you know the ancient tongue of the Pharaohs, my friend,” said the tall blue-eyed man. “You are Egyptian, are you not? All your life you have studied it. You can read it as well as you read Latin or Greek.”

Such a carefully modulated voice; it was trying to dispel all fear; civilized, courteous. What more could Samir have wanted?

“Yes, sir, you are right,” Samir said. “But I’ve never heard it spoken aloud, and the accent has always been a mystery. But you must tell me—” He forced himself to look at the man directly again. “You are an Egyptologist, I have been told. Do you believe it was the curse on the tomb that killed my beloved friend, Lawrence? Or did death take him naturally as we supposed?”

The man appeared to weigh the question; and in the shadows some feet away, Julie Stratford paled and lowered her eyes, and turned just a little away from both of them.

“Curses are words, my friend,” the man said. “Warnings to drive away the ignorant and meddlesome. It requires poison or some other crude weapon to take a human life unnaturally.”

“Poison!” Samir whispered.

“Samir, it’s very late,” Julie said. Her voice was raw, strained. “We mustn’t speak of all this now, or I’ll give way to tears again and feel foolish. We must speak of these things only when we really want to examine them.” She came forward and took both his hands. “I want you to come another night, when we can all sit down together.”

“Yes, Julie Stratford is very tired. Julie Stratford has been a great teacher. And I bid you good night, my friend. You are my friend, are you not? There are many things perhaps that we can say to each other. But for now, believe I shall protect Julie Stratford from anyone or anything that would hurt her.”

Samir walked slowly to the door.

“If you need me,” he said, turning back, “you must send for me.” He reached into his coat. He took out his card and stared at it, quite baffled for a moment. Then he gave it to the man. He watched the ring glinting in the light as the man took it from him.

“I am in my office at the British Museum very late every night. I walk the corridors when everyone is gone. Come to the side door, and you will find me.”

But why was he saying these things? What did he mean to convey? He wished suddenly the creature would speak the ancient tongue again; he could not understand the strange mixture of pain and joy that he felt; the strange darkening of the world, and the keen appreciation of light which had come with that darkening.

He turned and went out, hurrying down the granite steps and past the uniformed guards without so much as a glance in their direction. He walked fast through the cold damp streets. He ignored the cabs that slowed. He wanted only to be alone. He kept seeing that ring; hearing those old Egyptian words finally defined aloud as he had never heard them. He wanted to weep. A miracle had been revealed; yet somehow it threatened the miraculous all around him.

“Lawrence, give me guidance,” he whispered.

Julie shut the door and slipped the bolt.

She turned to Ramses. She could hear Rita’s tread on the floor above. They were alone, quite beyond Rita’s hearing.

“You don’t mean to trust him with your secret!” she asked.

“The harm is done,” he said quietly. “He knows the truth.
And your cousin Henry will tell others. And others, too, will come to believe.”

“No, that’s impossible. You saw yourself what happened with the police. Samir knows because he saw the ring; he recognized it. And because he came to see, and came to believe. Others will not do that. And somehow …”

“Somehow?”

“You wanted him to know. That’s why you addressed him by name. You told him who you were.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, I think that you did.”

He pondered this. He didn’t find the idea too agreeable. But it was true, she could have sworn so.

“Two who believe can make three,” he said, as if she hadn’t made the point at all.

“They cannot prove it. You’re real, yes, and the ring is real. But what is there really to connect you with the past! You don’t understand these times if you think it takes so little for men to believe that one has risen from the grave. This is the age of science, not religion.”

He was collecting his thoughts. He bowed his head and folded his arms and moved back and forth on the carpet. Then he stopped:

“Oh, my darling dear, if only you understood,” he said. There was no urgency in his voice, but there was great feeling. And it seemed the cadence was English now, almost intimately so. “For a thousand years I guarded this truth,” he said, “even from those I loved and served. They never knew whence I came, or how long I’d lived, or what had befallen me. And now I’ve blundered into your time, revealing this truth to more mortals in one full moon than ever knew it since Ramses ruled Egypt.”

“I understand,” she said. But she was thinking something else quite different.
You wrote the whole story in the scrolls. You left them there. And that was because you could not bear this secret any longer
. “You don’t understand these times,” she said again. “Miracles aren’t believed, even by those to whom they happen.”

“What a strange thing to say!”

“Were I to shout it from the rooftops no one would believe. Your elixir is safe, with or without these poisons.”

It seemed a shock of pain went through him. She saw it. She felt it. She regretted her words. What madness to think this
creature is all powerful, that his ready smile doesn’t conceal a vulnerability as vast as his strength. She was at a loss. She waited. And then his smile, once again, came to her rescue.

“What can we do but wait and see, Julie Stratford?”

He sighed. He removed his frock coat, and walked away from her into the Egyptian room. He stared at the coffin, his coffin, and then at the row of jars. He reached down and carefully switched on the electric lamp, as he had seen her do, and then looked up at the rows and rows of books rising over Lawrence’s desk to the ceiling.

“Surely you need to sleep,” she said. “Let me take you upstairs to Father’s room.”

“No, my darling dear, I do not sleep, except when I mean to take leave of life for the time being.”

“You mean … day in and day out, you need no sleep whatsoever!”

“That is correct,” he said, flashing her another little smile. “I shall tell you another wicked secret too. I do not need the food or the drink I take, I merely crave it. And my body enjoys it.” He laughed softly at her shock. “But what I do need now is to read in your father’s books, if you will allow me.”

“Of course, you needn’t ask me for such a thing,” she said. “You must take what you need and what you want. Go to his room when you wish. Put on his robe. I want you to have every comfort.” She laughed. “I’m beginning to speak the way you speak.”

They looked at each other. Only a few feet separated them, and she was grateful for them.

“I’ll leave you now,” she said, but instantly he caught her hand, and closed the distance and locked her in his arms, and kissed her again. Then, almost roughly he let her go.

“Julie is Queen in her own domain,” he said, a little apologetically.

“And your words to Samir, let us remember them. ‘But for now, I shall protect Julie Stratford from anyone or anything that would hurt her.’ ”

“I did not lie. And I should like to lie at your side, the better to protect you.”

She laughed softly. Better escape now while it was still morally and physically possible. “Oh, but there is one other thing,” she said. She went to the far northeast corner of the room, and opened the cabinet gramophone. She cranked the thing, and
looked at the RCA Victor records. Verdi’s
Aïda
. “Ah, the very thing,” she said. And no appalling picture on the front of the album to repel him. She put the heavy, brittle black disk on the velvet turntable. She set the arm in place. And then turned to watch his face as the triumphal march from the opera began, a low, faraway chorus of lovely voices.

“Oooh, but what is this magic! The machine is making music!”

“Just wind and play. And I shall sleep as mortal women do, dreaming, though real life has become all I ever dreamed it would be.”

She glanced back once to see him rocking to the music, his arms folded, his head bowed. He was singing with it, very low, under his breath. And even the simple sight of the white shirt stretched taut over his broad back and powerful arms sent the shivers through her.

S MIDNIGHT struck, Elliott closed the notebook. He had spent the evening reading Lawrence’s translations through and through, and reexamining his dusty old biographies of the King called Ramses the Great, and the Queen known as Cleopatra. There was nothing in these historical tomes that could not accommodate the assertions of the mummy’s preposterous story.

A man who ruled Egypt for sixty years might damn well have been immortal. And the reign of Cleopatra VI had been by any standards utterly remarkable.

But what intrigued him more than anything at the moment was a paragraph Lawrence had written in Latin and in Egyptian—the very last of his notes. Elliott had had no trouble reading this. He had kept his diary in Latin when he was in Oxford; and he had studied Egyptian for years along with Lawrence, and then on his own.

This was not a transcript of the material in Ramses’ scrolls. Rather the paragraph contained Lawrence’s private comments on what he’d read.

“Claims to have taken this elixir once and once only. No further infusion was required. Brewed the mix for Cleopatra, but felt it was unsafe to discard it. Reluctant to take it into his body for fear of adverse results. What if all chemicals in this tomb are properly tested? What if there is some chemical here
which has a rejuvenating effect upon the human body, and can substantially prolong life?”

The two lines in Egyptian were incoherent. They said something about magic, secrets, natural ingredients combined to wholly new effect.

So that is what Lawrence had believed, more or less. And he had taken pains to conceal it in the ancient languages. Now what did Elliott really believe about this situation? Especially in light of Henry’s story of the mummy coming to life?